1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to a system and method of providing collaboration in computer environments and, more specifically, to a system and method of collaborative knowledge work in a computer or network environment.
2. Background Description
In today's world, the concept of collaboration has many different meanings. In attempts to provide some measure of collaborative “knowledge work”, the marketplace has fragmented data access systems so that composite and unified sharing arrangements are essentially unachievable. For example (but not limited to), the following technologies are often used in attempts to implement collaborative knowledge work: E-mail, Workflow Automation, Groupware, Peer-to-Peer Collaboration, Enterprise Portal Services, Personal File System, Data Grid.
One aim of collaboration technology may be to increase the productivity of knowledge work. Available technologies have not accomplished this goal. Despite significant investment in collaboration technology, such as those undertaken to various degrees by Groove Networks, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft SharePoint, a leading industry analyst still asserts that “e-mail is used 90-95% of the time when people engage in collaboration.” A leading industry executive summed up the problem as: “The best that can be done today is simply using electronic mail where you're just mailing out things, and you get various people proposing edits on those things, and you're trying to pull it back together. There's no real sharing there; there's just e-mail going back and forth.”
Another leading industry research group reports that “e-mail is not an efficient interactive tool.” And finally, a leading industry research group states that it “does not believe vendors can perpetuate the value-added myth that groupware is anything more than e-mail”. In this last quote, groupware is referring to collaborative systems vis-à-vis e-mail. The group concludes by suggesting that “there should be more to collaboration than e-mail.”
Two categories of technology currently capture the substantial breadth of available collaboration systems: e-mail and the shared file system. Whereas industry leaders peg e-mail as “the problem” and offer solutions enabling a shared file system, e-mail continues to dominate the market for collaboration. E-mail is not the problem, and the shared file system is not the solution.
The general form of a data and software system today may be a single, static, and hierarchical tree structure. The file system and relational database both typically share this structure.
Good system design today may involve reducing complexity by normalizing data and object structures within a single hierarchy, as a “uniform”. Stated simply, the current medium of information work is discontinuous with this result: workers store data, have knowledge, and exchange information. Workers know what they store and retrieve in data systems (pull). They receive what they do not know (information) by explicit means of communication. Thus, what is stored in data systems is not the information product, but a data product. Its value is not stored, but known and communicated by explicit means (such as e-mail and telephone).
If collaboration is a function of information, and not data, then collaboration today is performed by explicit means only, and is not managed systematically. Users directly communicate information based on contextual knowledge of data through e-mail, phone, and at the proverbial “water cooler”. Explicit/direct information transfer is largely slow, ad-hoc, unreliable, and incomplete.
Existing computer environments for knowledge work, while frequently labeled information systems, are in fact only data systems. The product of knowledge work is a complex combination of content and context. Knowledge workers currently store the content of data as a file, but remember the data context, the informational component of data. That is, the element of data that is information is not stored in data systems today. Existing data mediums lack the critical element of information: “context”.
This explains why the content of existing data systems is largely void of information. These data systems lack the context required to convert data into information. Knowledge workers remember data context, and store data content. A “knowledge gap” then exists by definition between the contextual knowledge of one worker and another (why knowledge workers need knowledge). The knowledge gap is the “unknown unknown” (versus a “known unknown”). The knowledge gap makes information today largely invaluable and unmanageable. The knowledge gap resultantly leads to the hierarchical, top-down structure of knowledge work and organizational hierarchy, and hence, its systematic inefficiency and unmanageability.
Stored data currently lacks the context/information required to interpret data content. As such, the knowledge gap accounts for a lack of knowledge transfer, and ultimately the loss of core value in the knowledge economy. The reality of knowledge work today was recently described by a well know industry executive as “the cess pool that is the file system”. A large volume of data, lacking information context, is meaningless. Given the limitations of the human mind, stored data is largely unmanageable and incapable of providing long-term value.
The knowledge gap explains why data systems today are “pull” oriented. Workers pull data out of the system based on their (contextual) knowledge of its content. The knowledge gap also explains why knowledge work is pull oriented beyond computer data systems and is why individuals become information specialists, or contextual knowledge repositories (such as, for example, an attorney with specific knowledge of a client or matter). Knowledge work has remained pull oriented because the only complex data medium presently in existence is essentially the human mind.
As such, while data is managed, information today is unmanaged. The fundamental limitation/flaw of each of the above system as a technique of collaboration may be characterized as follows e-mail:
E-mail is purely decentralized (a decentralized process and product). Context is the central, enabling feature of e-mail based collaboration. The inbox is a unique and private store for each user. A message comprises a unique information context (containing the message and file attachments) for a specified group of recipients. Context may be considered a private information space shared by a group of individuals (context may also describe the component of knowledge currently uncaptured by data systems). E-mail provides superior context by its ease of use and flexibility. Participating in a private information context is simply a matter of creating or replying to a message, with attached files.
However, its “explicit” mode of information transfer induces overwhelming complexity in a collaborative setting. The quantity of explicit information required to coordinate a collaboration increases exponentially with the number of workers (on the order of 2n, where ‘n’ is the number of workers), resulting in information exchange that is slow, ad-hoc, unreliable, and incomplete (and which grows increasingly inefficient with the number of workers or volume of managed information).
Finally, with each file exchanged by e-mail attachment, the collaborative product becomes “dis-integrated”. File sets and their constituent versions divide and exponentiate in number across user inboxes and file systems, creating an intellectually unmanageable product and process (work of one individual is frequently lost, unknown, or conflicts with others' work).
The shared file system is purely centralized. As a result, it provides only one context itself. Pure centralization thus sacrifices context in favor of a uniform and shared file structure. But how can two users work on the same document or stage a review cycle? Typically, users resort to e-mail. A single, shared structure is incapable of supporting the requisite context of interaction among workers in a collaborative setting. For example, consider what occurs if a team creates two shared spaces, and accessed by different members. By creating multiple information spaces, the team has simply fragmented, or disintegrated the information product. In gaining collaborative “context” (e.g., a private shared information space), the team typically fragments the collaborative information product and loses continuity. Finally, allowing users to simultaneously edit to a file does not in itself provide context, since there remains only one (albeit shared) information context (e-mail remains the only medium for contextual collaboration).
Serial and parallel work flow in current data management systems remain unreconciled. For example, assuming an information space is currently embodied as a shared file store, recent implementations automatically synchronize a space (in a parallel work flow) by exchanging deltas among members of the space in real-time. Such peer-to-peer systems effectively enable parallel work flow, but miss the necessary element of serial work flow. As a result, knowledge workers resort to e-mail for serial work flow. E-mail allows the staged transfer of files/versions, and as such, is the de facto standard for serial work flow. In this way, work flow is bifurcated between two systems: the shared file store/real-time conferencing technology (parallel work flow) and e-mail (serial work flow).
Those technologies typically identified as “work flow system” (such as, for example, Microsoft SQL Work Flow Designer or InfoPath) require construction of a work flow prior to execution. Such work flow is used to perform repetitive tasks (e.g., billing, accounting, or surveys). However, this system class is effectively (and in practice) excluded from use by knowledge workers, since neither the process nor product of knowledge work can be known before it is performed (that knowledge is required to construct an a priori work flow).
Therefore, knowledge workers are at present stuck with divergent and unreconciled methods of work flow, which neither individually, nor collectively, provide a workable solution. As a result, workers experience “information overload” as they attempt to manually execute work flow, as they attempt to integrate file versions forked and scattered across hard drives distributed via e-mail.
The invention reconciles these deficiencies and introduces a new paradigm for collaborative information management.